Beasts and Super-Beasts eBook

“That would be telling what our characters
are meant to be,” said Vera.

“Didn’t I warn you?” said Sir Nicholas
tragically to his wife.

“It’s something to do with Spanish history;
we don’t mind giving you that clue,” said
Skatterly, helping himself cheerfully to salad, and
then Bertie van Tahn broke forth into peals of joyous
laughter.

“I’ve got it! Ferdinand and Isabella
deporting the Jews! Oh, lovely! Those two
have certainly won the prize; we shan’t get anything
to beat that for thoroughness.”

Lady Blonze’s Christmas party was talked about
and written about to an extent that she had not anticipated
in her most ambitious moments. The letters from
Waldo’s mother would alone have made it memorable.

COUSIN TERESA

Basset Harrowcluff returned to the home of his fathers,
after an absence of four years, distinctly well pleased
with himself. He was only thirty-one, but he
had put in some useful service in an out-of-the-way,
though not unimportant, corner of the world.
He had quieted a province, kept open a trade route,
enforced the tradition of respect which is worth the
ransom of many kings in out-of-the-way regions, and
done the whole business on rather less expenditure
than would be requisite for organising a charity in
the home country. In Whitehall and places where
they think, they doubtless thought well of him.
It was not inconceivable, his father allowed himself
to imagine, that Basset’s name might figure
in the next list of Honours.

Basset was inclined to be rather contemptuous of his
half-brother, Lucas, whom he found feverishly engrossed
in the same medley of elaborate futilities that had
claimed his whole time and energies, such as they
were, four years ago, and almost as far back before
that as he could remember. It was the contempt
of the man of action for the man of activities, and
it was probably reciprocated. Lucas was an over-well
nourished individual, some nine years Basset’s
senior, with a colouring that would have been accepted
as a sign of intensive culture in an asparagus, but
probably meant in this case mere abstention from exercise.
His hair and forehead furnished a recessional note
in a personality that was in all other respects obtrusive
and assertive. There was certainly no Semitic
blood in Lucas’s parentage, but his appearance
contrived to convey at least a suggestion of Jewish
extraction. Clovis Sangrail, who knew most of
his associates by sight, said it was undoubtedly a
case of protective mimicry.

Two days after Basset’s return, Lucas frisked
in to lunch in a state of twittering excitement that
could not be restrained even for the immediate consideration
of soup, but had to be verbally discharged in spluttering
competition with mouthfuls of vermicelli.

“I’ve got hold of an idea for something
immense,” he babbled, “something that
is simply It.”